Tag: GOP trickle down economics

How You — And Congress — Subsidize The Richest Americans

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ProPublica scored a fantastic scoop when it obtained and meticulously analyzed 15 years of raw income tax data on the wealthiest Americans. This leak of Internal Revenue Service records is by far the biggest and most important tax news in the 55 years that I’ve reported on taxes.

Thanks to the leaker, we now know beyond any doubt that the endless claims that America has a progressive income tax system are bunk. A progressive system means that the more you make, the greater the share of your income you pay in taxes. Back in 2005, I got the George W. Bush administration to acknowledge that the system stops becoming progressive near the top.

But, unfortunately, ProPublica shows that it’s even worse than what I reported back then. Continue reading.

Economist Paul Krugman explains why Trump’s corporate tax cuts were a ‘dismal failure’

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President Joe Biden has proposed a corporate tax hike as a way to pay for his ambitious infrastructure plan, and some Republicans are objecting vehemently — insisting that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was a raging success. But liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman disagrees, slamming the Trump-era GOP tax cuts as a “dismal failure” in a Twitter thread posted on April 5.

Passed when Donald Trump was president and Republicans controlled both branches of Congress, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the United States’ corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% — and Biden has proposed increasing it to 28%. Many Democrats have emphasized that the Republican tax cuts of late 2017 did precious little for the American middle class and greatly increased the federal deficit.

Krugman, in his Twitter thread, writes, “I’ve been a bit surprised to see some Republicans opposing Biden’s plans by claiming that the Trump tax cut for corporations was a big success. I thought they’d gone into hiding given its dismal failure.” Continue reading.

Democrats demand repeal of ‘obscene’ tax cut for millionaires that GOP buried in previous COVID relief bill

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A group of 120 Democratic members of Congress is calling on their party’s leadership to ensure that a tax break for millionaires that Republicans quietly buried in an earlier coronavirus relief package is repealed in upcoming aid legislation, arguing the rollback would free up hundreds of billions in revenue which could be used to help struggling families.

Led by Reps. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) in the Senate, the coalition of lawmakers sent a letter to Democratic leaders on Tuesday demanding the reversal of “costly tax breaks for so-called ‘net operating losses’ that Republicans tucked into the CARES Act,” a $2 trillion relief measure that former President Donald Trump signed into law last March.

“These special-interest giveaways will confer over 80 percent of the benefits to just 43,000 taxpayers, each earning at least $1 million per year,” reads the letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “We urge you to repeal these unwarranted tax cuts, as HEROES and HEROES 2.0 proposed and President Biden has recommended. This would save over $250 billion, which should be repurposed to help Americans who have lost income due to the pandemic and its economic fallout.” Continue reading.

GOP digs in on preserving Trump tax cuts

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Republicans are signaling a determination to protect their 2017 tax-cut law and prevent President Biden from making good on campaign pledges to partially undo the measure.

The tax law, enacted after GOP lawmakers sought for years to slash rates for individuals and businesses, was one of former President Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishments. But with Democratic control of Congress, Biden has new avenues for delivering on his 2020 promises.

Biden has called for rolling back the Trump tax cuts on people making above $400,000 a year and to partially reverse the reduction in the corporate tax rate. And even though he has indicated tax increases are not his most immediate priority, Biden has noted they could be a way to finance his spending priorities down the line. Continue reading.

Trump ends it all with one final scam — and it bodes badly for Trumpism’s future

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For a presidency that’s been awash in grift and deception from the start, you could not have scripted a more fitting end.

In his final moments as president, Donald Trump hailed his massive tax cut for the rich and corporations as one of his leading accomplishments — just after pardoning the chief architect of his “economic populism,” all to protect him from facing charges that he literally stole money from Trump supporters with a two-bit scam promising to help build his border wall.

As Trump prepared to depart from Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday morning, he hailed his presidency as “amazing, by any standard.” Continue reading.

Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn’t Trickle Down, Study Says

Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic.

The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth.

“Policy makers shouldn’t worry that raising taxes on the rich to fund the financial costs of the pandemic will harm their economies,” Hope said in an interview. Continue reading.

The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. That is exactly the plan

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The reason everybody is so angst-ridden about the economy is because we all have the wrong idea about what it is supposed to do and how it’s supposed to work. 

Most of us have a quaint, 19th century idea about free markets and all that up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger stuff. You know, work hard, play by the rules, keep your nose clean, and you’ll do well. That is certainly the cultural myth our society bathes us in.

But that’s not how things actually work. It’s the dissonance between how we imagine things work and how they really work that causes our perplexity and angst, and rage. It is also that dissonance that has been so deftly manipulated by Donald Trump and given rise to Trumpism. Continue reading.

The GOP traded democracy for a Supreme Court seat and tax cuts. It wasn’t worth it.

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Was it worth it?

Republican lawmakers must ask themselves this question at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, whenever that is. Perhaps then they will finally inventory every misdeed they ignored or encouraged, every scar they seared into our republic and its institutions, in pursuit of their holy grail: another Supreme Court seat.

Two Republican senators, Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), have said they oppose a vote on a Supreme Court nominee so close to the election. This principle, of course, was widely endorsed by Republicans four years ago, when the GOP-controlled Senate refused to even hold hearings for the nominee President Barack Obama had put forward in March. Continue reading.

Surprise! Under Trump, Super-Rich Rake In Billions While You Get…A #MAGA Hat

If you are in the 99 percent here is how well you are faring under Trump policies compared to the 1 percent: for each dollar of increased income that you earned in 2018, each One-Percenter got $88 more income.

Huge as that ratio is, it’s small change compared to the super-rich, the 0.01 percent of Americans with incomes of $10 million and up. That ratio is $1 for you and $2,215 for each super-rich American household. Let’s call them the Platinum-Premiere-Point-Zero-One-Percenters.

The slice of American income pie going to the poor shrank under Trump by the same amount that it grew for the super-rich.

Ponder that. Continue reading.